PROFILEHow did Riley's mom end up here?The once-quiet student is accused in death of her daughter, known as 'Baby Grace'

TERRI LANGFORD, Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle |
December 2, 2007

With the support of wife Catherine and 3-month-old son Braden, Robert Sawyers, Riley's father, tries to cope with his daughter's death. Residents of his hometown of Mentor, Ohio, are struggling with the news.

MENTOR, OHIO — When Kimberly Dawn Trenor set up her online World of Warcraft game account from the computer belonging to her ex-boyfriend's mother in this suburban Cleveland town, she chose a character to do the one thing she seemed unable to do her whole life: escape risky situations.

Considering her life so far, it was no wonder she naturally gravitated toward the World of Warcraft's magic-casters, the mages, who could summon spells or open escape routes for members of her guild, or team.

Offline, her life could not be more different.

Once on track to be a summa cum laude graduate, Trenor found herself pregnant at 15. By 16, she was mother to a baby girl, Riley Ann Sawyers. By 18, this daughter of divorced parents and her young child were dependent on the family of her baby's father, living in a cozy, two-story apartment with four other people.

She remained there, even after she broke up with the father, Robert Sawyers, a year ago, and even after Sawyers began dating another girl, who became pregnant and moved into the same apartment with Trenor and Riley.

Now at 19, Trenor sits in the Galveston County Jail after failing, once again, to properly navigate the path ahead of her.

With her new husband, a warlock teammate she met online last spring while playing the game, she stands accused of beating 2-year-old Riley with a belt, then hiding the body in a box for two months before throwing the girl into Galveston Bay. A fisherman made the grisly discovery on Oct. 29.

In Trenor's hometown of Mentor, pronounced "Men-ner" by the locals, few knew the unobtrusive girl well. Those who did say they could not have foreseen her taking part in her own child's homicide.

"No, never," said Sawyers, a teddy-bearish 20-year-old who looks at least five years younger. He met Trenor when the two were walking laps in gym class together, halfway through their sophomore year. "She was quiet, shy, kind of a loner."

School to motherhood

At Mentor High School, faculty could not recall Trenor taking part in extracurricular activities. She excelled in most subjects through that 10th-grade year, but teachers were pressed to remember a single thing Trenor participated in other than classwork.

Still, Trenor could have easily left this Lake Erie town of 51,000 and its monotonous rows of plain box homes painted white, cream, gray and the occasional powder blue by going on to college.

"She was a pretty good student," recalled Joe Spiccia, Mentor High School's principal, shaking his head. School privacy rules prevented Spiccia from revealing Trenor's grade point average when she graduated in May 2006.

"She didn't end as a bad student," he said. But her graduation GPA was not the stellar 3.8 or above, the range that declares you summa cum laude, or with the greatest honor. That summa cum laude GPA she had obtained by the end of her sophomore year began slipping as soon as she became pregnant, Spiccia said.

Not that the school, which is the largest in Ohio, didn't try to prevent Trenor's sliding class ranking. Mentor, like a lot of schools nationwide, adopted a program called GRADS, or Graduation, Reality and Dual-Support, for pregnant students and their boyfriends.

Trenor and Sawyers were both enrolled and learned basic parenting skills. The idea is to create a support system for pregnant teens and their boyfriends to keep them in school. This year, 25 students among the more than 2,000 who attend Mentor's 10th through 12th grades are enrolled in GRADS.

Trenor graduated. But Sawyers dropped out to work at a machine shop to support his new family. He later obtained his GED. At the invitation of his mother, Sheryl Sawyers, a licensed nurse, the two teenage parents began a life together at Sawyers' home as soon as Riley was born on March 11, 2005.

For the first year, Trenor was an attentive mom, although at 16, one who needed guidance herself.

Then, beginning last fall, the relationship between the two parents, perhaps because of their youth or the lack of a home they could call their own, began to deteriorate.

In October 2006, Trenor abruptly ended the relationship.

"She dumped me," Sawyers said, with no elaboration. Trenor even returned a ring Sawyers had given her.

Curiously, Trenor and Riley continued to live with Sawyers' family. To complicate things further, Sawyers began dating a girl in his bowling league, Catherine Priester, a girl from a rival high school and whom he had known before Trenor.

Noticing a change

When Priester discovered she was pregnant with a son this past February and her own parents asked her to leave, she moved in with the Sawyers, Trenor and Riley.

As awkward as that sounds, Sawyers and Priester said everyone seemed to get along. Trenor and Priester were like sisters, Sawyers said.

"I took care of Riley," Priester said. "She was a bundle of energy. She was well-behaved as a 2-year-old."

But a change in Trenor was already noticeable, particularly in her obsession with World of Warcraft. Perhaps it was the power of control of at least a virtual reality that was so addictive. Or maybe it was the challenge of navigating something that engaged her mind.

"That was my doing," Sawyers said of his former girlfriend. He introduced the game to Trenor, teaching her how to arm her online persona with skills and abilities to do battle with everything from elves to ogres, all equipped with their own powers.

"I played it a little," Sawyer said. "But she got wrapped in it."

Soon, Trenor was zoning out from the life around her. As Firefly or Firee, the two character names she used, Trenor lived a dashing, colorful life online, leading her guild away from danger by teleporting them to safety or creating food or drink to replenish her virtual team so they could fight their way to the next game level with the click of a computer mouse.

"Kim got hooked on it," Priester said. "She'd be on it three, four hours, be on it until one in the morning."

More than once, Trenor would ask others to bring her some takeout for dinner because she didn't want to leave the computer.

Then Trenor began talking about a player in her guild, some guy from Houston who plied her with stories about his offline life in the oil industry, working for a Shell Oil contractor.

"I think pretty much, you know, like he could be anybody he wanted to be on the Internet," said Sheryl Sawyers, Riley's grandmother. "Kim was young, I mean, 18 years old, naive. Maybe he painted a pretty picture and that's, you know, what made her move down there."

The man turned out to be Royce Clyde Ziegler II, who also was jailed this past week and charged in connection with Riley's death.

Interestingly enough, online, Zeigler was a powerful warlock, a character not unlike a mage gone bad. The game's warlocks tap into the evil side of magic and rule over demonic minions that do their bidding. A warlock's spell can do damage immediately to an enemy or damage over time, eroding an enemy's power slowly.

Offline, his influence over Trenor was quick and immediate.

"She used to talk about him," Robert Sawyers recalled, but no one considered him any kind of threat.

Then in late March, Trenor filed a domestic violence report against Riley's father, alleging he tried to choke her in an argument over a parking space at his mother's apartment.

Sawyers said the argument never escalated into violence and the charge was reduced to disorderly conduct.

Then on May 23, the couple appeared back in court to discuss the charge and custody of Riley. Neither had an attorney present and Trenor was awarded custody. But neither Trenor nor Sawyers was aware of something called a relocation clause, a standard insert into custody agreements that requires a custodial parent to notify the court if he or she plans to leave the area.

"After that hearing, Kimberly disappeared," said Laura DePledge, the lawyer obtained later by Sawyers.

A shocking revelation

DePledge filed several motions and requests to bring Riley's mother back to explain herself.

The request was denied because Sawyers didn't have legal custody.

"It's very, very frustrating," DePledge said. "It's easy to track kids who are in school, but how do you track children who are not school age?"

Six days after Trenor disappeared, she and Zeigler filed for a Texas marriage license. On June 1, they were married.

Five days later, Trenor was back in Ohio for a child support hearing. No one knew she was married or where she was staying.

She told Sawyers that her father was watching Riley.

As quickly as she returned, she vanished again.

About a week later, she obtained a Texas driver's license. Meanwhile, in Ohio, Sawyers and his mother called relatives and friends, trying to locate Riley and her mother. Trenor's own family told the Sawyers Trenor might be in Maryland, Virginia or Pennsylvania.

Then a break came in August when DePledge discovered Trenor's Texas license. Attempts to serve her with court papers failed. Trenor told the Sawyers when they called that Riley was taking a nap or outside playing.

But as the Sawyers went to court, their efforts were in vain.

In reality, Riley had already been killed, beaten on July 24 with belts, held underwater in the bathtub and thrown against a tile floor, according to Trenor's statement to Galveston authorities.

News of Riley's last hours, revealed earlier this week, has shocked Mentor residents.

"It is disgusting," said Lynn Baringer, activities director of the Mentor Way Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, where Sheryl Sawyers works and where now, the nursing home is preparing a fundraising spaghetti dinner on Dec. 15 for the Sawyers family so they can pay for Riley's funeral.

"If she (Riley) had been dropped on a street in Texas, Sheryl would have walked to Texas to get her," Baringer said. "This should not be her story."